When I was in
meeting on the Sunday before the election, I said that, no matter the outcome,
life would go on, that the light would overcome the darkness and, to quote
Julian of Norwich, all shall be well.
“Easy for you to say!”
It’s all too easy
to have hope, to have faith when you think things will go one way, the right
way, the way they should. It was easy to say all shall be well, to have faith,
when it seemed possible, if not a sure thing, that Kamala Harris would win. All I can say now that Donald Trump has been
elected (decisively, more than the first time) is that it is time to work that
muscle, that faith muscle. As Julian of Norwich no doubt knew living in a time
of plague and war, faith is indeed a muscle that has to be worked, that has to
be exercised.
We are in for a lot
of work – or a lot of working out.
Meanwhile, as Trump’s
foreboding appointees and nominations are coming in fast and furious, I’m glad
that my dad didn’t live to see to see Trump win the presidency for the second
time. According to my sister, my dad “was
living his best life,” hiking and “cooking up a storm” with his similarly widowed
wife on the Northern California coast just a few days before he died on
September 23 at the age of 96. I imagine that the reasonable expectation that
Harris had a decent chance of winning was a small part of this. Likewise, I’ve been grateful that my mom didn’t
see Trump win the first time; she died in July in 2016 before the November
election.
In some ways, as I
reflected in my recent Claremont Courier which follows, my father was a
remarkable man, and, as difficult as growing up with a remarkable father sometimes
was, it is why my life has been remarkable.
LIVING
IN CLAREMONT, AND THE WORLD, WITH DAD
Some years ago, I went to Pitzer College’s commencement ceremony to hear
the speaker: Angela Davis, the fiery, militant Black Panther-turned respected
if not universally admired philosophy professor. She was lately known at the time for speaking
out against the “prison-industrial complex.” Early in her address to the
graduates, she mentioned having briefly taught here at the colleges a number of
years ago.
I wonder if my dad
met her – or perhaps hired her.
I’ve been thinking
about this and other things, things I wished I’d asked my dad about, since my
dad died on September 23 at the age of 96. Although I had been secretly rooting
for him to make it to 100, he lived a remarkably long and, as I was reminded in
going over stuff for his obituary, rich life, some 40 years of it in
Claremont.
For example, I was
reminded that several years after moving here with my mom and older sister from
San Francisco in the early 60’s when I was 2 to join the math department at
then-new Harvey Mudd College, he chaired a committee charged with finding ways
to increase diversity at all the colleges here.
This was a time of much unrest – Vietnam, civil rights – and I have
vague memories of him talking to my mom, sometimes quite heatedly, about
something called “Black studies.”
Did he meet Ms. Davis, have a hand in having her come to
teach?
I knew Dad biked to
work and swam every day, rain or shine, in the college pool. I knew this, but
there was plenty of other stuff about his work that I, and all the rest of us,
didn’t know about or at least understand.
Him being the chair of the all-college diversity committee – or why he,
a math professor, was in this position – wasn’t that much of a mystery in
comparison.
It was like my dad
had another, secret life. His field of
study was a very high level of algebra, far above the Algebra II that I
struggled through in high school to get a grade adequate to get into the
University of California. In this
rarefied math world, my dad was something of a rock star. After his death, we
received e-mails from mathematicians and former students from all over the
world offering condolences and singing his praises.
He was also
something of a diplomat. Some of the
mathematicians he worked with were in Hungary and Poland, in the shadow of the
then-Soviet Union, and he somehow arranged to have them visit the U.S,
including Claremont. A few stayed in our
house, which made for some weird dinnertime conversations.
This work gave the
family some extraordinary benefits. In
addition to extended stays in Vancouver, Canada and Berkeley, we lived in
Ferrara, Italy for eight months and in London for a year in the 70’s. My dad and mom pushed me in my wheelchair and
sometimes carried me around in European cities, English villages, countless
museums, castles and country homes. It
gave me a taste for good food and made me appreciate Little Bridges and the
Scripps College campus all the more.
But in other ways,
Dad was just a dad. We went swimming at
Scripps and Harvey Mudd and went Christmas caroling with other Claremont
colleges faculty families. We went
camping and took trips up the coast.
He was quite a
handyman and enjoyed designing and making things to make my life easier, like a
board with a typewriter keyboard painted with nail polish (pink) that I could
use when my speech was difficult to understand and a small staircase with three
carpeted steps so that I could literally climb into bed. Later, he introduced me to personal computers
and e-mail when they first came out, with the idea that they would make work
and communication easier for me.
Dad could be
difficult. He was demanding, precise. In most if not all situations, there was
only one right answer. He was, after
all, a mathematician. Having him help me with math homework was often more of a
challenge (“It’s obvious!” It wasn’t), and, later, we got into heated
discussions about my decisions.
But, also with his
mathematician’s eye, he appreciated beauty and encouraged me to enjoy nature,
to enjoy the performing arts, to enjoy literature. When I left for college, he told me to
explore and have fun. My dad taught me
discipline and determination, and, as hard as these lessons sometimes were,
they are why my life has been, despite all its physical challenges, so full, so
productive, so rich. I am very grateful for this.
